Wednesday, February 19, 2003
My Kit Porsche
Parking Spots (found
via Jason Kottke) is
an interesting photographic site where you take a picture of a toy car in
such a way as to make it appear the site of a real car. Since I didn't have
a matchbox car, I decided to use one of the Lego cars I
had sitting around.
So there I am, outside, holding the car out at arms length and taking photos of it against the other cars in the parking lot at the Facility in the Middle of Nowhere and getting some rather strange looks from the kids running around while I attempt to work my way around focal length problems.
It's not easy getting keeping an object in the near foreground and an object in the far background both in focus—unless you have can have a high f/stop (an f/stop is a ratio of the diameter of the apature to the focal length and a stop is defined as the iris (or apature) opening which will allow twice or half the light as the previous or next stop) you are going to have a problem with the focus, and in order to get a small opening, you either need a lot of light or a long exposure. But the problem with a long exposure is that any movement of the camera will generate ghost images or an exremely blurry picture.
But we are now in the world of digital photography where we can now
compensate fairly easily this problem. After reviewing the pictures I had
(most with slightly blurry backgrounds) I decided to take two pictures—one with the toy car (and a blurry background) and one without the toy car (of just the background, but a sharper
background) and do some post processing later—namely, cutting my hand with
the car out of the first photo and pasting it into the second photo, with
some cropping (since I didn't bother cutting my entire hand out).
The results weren't bad—a little jagged along the thumb side of my hand, but I'm still getting used to doing the image cut-n-paste thing. I then sent the resulting image off to Parking Spots so it should show up in a day or so.
Update later today
The entry I made bounced back since their mailbox had overfloweth. I'll have to submit the entry later …
